Chapter 11
Eleven
J osie left the last store with another bag weighing her down.
The annual Black Friday Christmas shopping with her mom was fun normally, but today she was tired and cranky.
And depressed. She admitted it. Realizing that she was in love with Carter should have been a happy moment, an exciting one. But it just left her petrified.
What if he didn’t love her back? What if he couldn’t?
“You know, Josie, Myra Simmons’s nephew was very taken with you at church last week.”
Myra Simmons’s nephew made her skin crawl. “Mom, I do not need you to play matchmaker.”
Deborah stopped walking and placed her hand on Josie’s arm. It was her mom face, her I’m-worried-but-you-can-still-decide-for-yourself face.
“He’s a more suitable young man for you, Josie. I know you don’t want to be alone.”
She didn’t want to be alone. But she didn’t want to be with just anyone, either. She only wanted Carter.
“I can’t. I just…I’m not interested in him that way.”
“Josie, you barely know him. You just need to give him a chance. You know he’s going to seminary. He’s going to be a minister.”
And there it was. The real reason for the push.
“Mom, I know you love being a preacher’s wife. You love being active in the church and taking care of the congregation…I don’t. I don’t want to do those things. I want to work around books, and I want to go home at night and read more books. And I don’t want to feel responsible for everybody.”
Deborah started walking away, but Josie knew the conversation wasn’t over. When her mother got something in her head like that, she was a pit bull.
“It can be a very rewarding life, Josephine. It gives you strength and courage.”
“It gives you strength and courage. You. Not me. I just want books,” Josie insisted.
Deborah nodded. “You’re sure you won’t even have lunch with him?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
Deborah clucked her tongue. “Myra will be so disappointed. She really wanted to see you all get together.”
Not likely, Josie thought. Myra was just angling for a better social position within the church. Not that Myra was a bad person. She wasn’t. She was actually a very good person, but there was definitely a hierarchy at play among the female portion of the congregation.
“She’ll adjust,” Josie said conversationally. “Mom, would you—Never mind.”
“What is it, Josie?”
“I have to tell you the truth. I’ve been seeing Carter.”
Deborah nodded. “I know that. I know you, and I could tell that something was different for you. Are you in love with him?”
Two middle-aged men vacated one of the benches outside the department store, and Josie made a beeline for it.
She sat down and tucked the bags beneath her.
If they were going to talk about Carter, it was best to do it there rather than anywhere in Fontaine, where every set of ears in town would be pressed against the door.
“I don’t really know. I think so. But I’ve never been in love. I’ve never even thought that I was in love,” she admitted. “Is there something wrong with me?”
Deborah smiled sadly. “Josie, you were a year old when we brought you home. And you hated to be held. You hated for us to touch you. You’d cry because you were hungry or dirty, then you’d cry because we were feeding you or changing you.
I felt like the worst failure as a mother.
I thought, in those moments when you were screaming like we were killing you, that maybe God had been right not to give me any babies.
Clearly, I had no skill at soothing one. ”
“I’m sorry I was so awful,” Josie whispered, feeling even more guilty than ever.
Deborah looked at her then with tears in her eyes.
“But you weren’t, my sweet girl. You were only scared.
No one had held you before. When you’d been fed and changed before, it had been rough or perfunctory at best. You were afraid because you’d never known what it was like to have someone touch you with actual tenderness…
with love. So you cried every time, until one day, maybe a month or so later, you just didn’t.
I was holding you and rocking you and you just let me.
You stared up at me with those big gray eyes, like you’d finally put two and two together, and knew that we wouldn’t hurt you. ”
Josie couldn’t speak for the lump in her throat. She clenched her hands together in her lap and just stared at the ground. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, the patience and the faith that it had taken for her mother to keep trying day in and day out.
“Everyone always told me how lucky I was, and I know they’re right.” She finally managed. “But I didn’t know how right.”
Deborah sighed. “And it stroked my ego, Josie. I try to be the best Christian I can be, but I have pride just like everyone else. And when people would say that to you, I should have stopped them right there and said that we were the lucky ones. But I didn’t.
Because they always talked about our faith, being good Christians, about doing the Lord’s work.
And at first, I felt like letting them have that little bit of sympathy for where you’d come from.
I didn’t think it hurt anything. But I was wrong.
It hurt you. Every time. And I was too blinded by my own piety to see it. ”
“Why are you telling me all this now?”
Deborah squared her shoulders. “Because part of you is still that scared baby who doesn’t trust anyone that touches her gently. Is he good to you?”
“Carter is wonderful to me,” she said. “He really isn’t what people say he is, Mom. I’m not in any way suggesting that he’s an angel, or that he hasn’t sown more than his share of wild oats, but that’s not all there is to him.”
“Then invite him to church. If you want this thing between you all to last, you can’t just keep sneaking around forever. It might be fun. It might feel decadent and forbidden, but that wears off after a while, Josephine. Bring him to church and go from there.”
Josie tried to imagine how that invitation would go over. Not well. Not well at all. But she’d try. She had no other choice.